Baby with spina bifida surgery in womb

Medical Surgeons have in the King's College Hospital in London to have a baby in the womb surgery. Reports that BBC today. The child had spina bifida, a condition in which the arches of the vertebrae are not properly closed. The special operation, which happened at a gestational age of 27 weeks, went well according to the doctors of the hospital.

After a routinescan in twenty weeks later the 29-year-old Sherrie Sharp to hear that something wasn't right with her unborn baby. The doctors suggested spina bifida, or spina bifida, the child. If the condition is not treated in time, can spina bifida cause motor problems, bladder, kidney and bowel problems and an imbalance of the back.

Read First: first baby born in the womb of a deceased donor grew

When Sherrie learned that her child has a serious condition had to the back, she thought to say no time to her pregnancy to be stopped early. For her was a surgery of her unborn baby the best option, as she tells the BBC. “I was hoping that in this way a better life would get,” what it sounds like.

Delicate operation

Surgeons made three incisions in the abdomen of the pregnant woman and placed a small camera in her uterus. During a three-hour surgery to put the doctors the exposed spinal cord of the child at his place and brought a connection to the spinal cord to cover it. “It was a very delicate operation in which we in the near come of nerves”, explains Marta Santorum-Perez, a pediatrician at King's College Hospital.

According to the medical team went the surgery very well. The first operation of an unborn child with spina bifida in Great Britain found at the end of last year, so message BBC.

Birth

Sherrie had in the meantime BBC know that her baby, which is the name Jaxson got, six weeks after the operation, on april 20 - in the world. The child currently resides is still in the neonatal department of the London hospital. “Jaxson moves his legs,” says the mother. “I am very proud of him. He is a miracle.”

Spina bifida, the developmental disorder of the spinal cord and the vertebral column, is an average of four to five children in ten thousand births.